


someday all these old refrains will set you loose

by preciousthings



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Coming Out, Friendship, Gen, Introspection, past Luke/Alex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:41:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26918272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preciousthings/pseuds/preciousthings
Summary: So here’s the thing: Luke doesn’t wake up one day and decide he’s going to find out more than he’s ever cared to know about Bobby’s career after they died. It just sort of… happens.
Relationships: Julie Molina & Luke Patterson
Comments: 26
Kudos: 191





	someday all these old refrains will set you loose

**Author's Note:**

> long time, no see, ao3! 
> 
> this fic fully would not exist without grace, who is, in every way, the julie to my flynn or the flynn to my julie. thanks for letting me talk this out and also for throwing out hypothetical song titles and coming up with the backstory for "coconut" AND THEN LITERALLY WRITING THE SONG. ilysm, this is for you! 
> 
> thanks to elena, for reading this over, and to michael friedman, for writing the middle spaces - the song in which the title comes from. 
> 
> this silly little idea wouldn't leave my head; i hope y'all enjoy it <3

Luke is sort of a curious person. 

Curious in life, curious in death. He’s just a kid who asks a lot of questions. 

Which is what makes it so hard to stay away from finding out more about Bobby— no, Trevor— no, he’s fucking Bobby— and what he did after they died. Luke knows he’s a thief, but he wants to know more. 

People used to tell him that what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and he really should have listened. What he does know about what Bobby’s been up to since he died _really_ hurts. 

It’s a weird feeling, to have been betrayed so deeply by someone so close to you and for them to never know that you know, because you’re fucking _dead_. Forgive and forget is not part of his vocabulary. He’s never made peace with it; instead, he vacillates between betrayed, hurt, and furious among other strong, usually pretty negative feelings, but sometimes he just— lets himself be sad about it. Without any of the heat of the anger, just pure sadness when he realizes that Bobby got everything he ever wanted, and used Luke’s words to get it. 

It fucking sucks, but it’s fleeting. Julie will come into the studio to work out a melody that’d been stuck in her head or Reggie will say something ridiculous, and all he’s able to think about is how grateful he is to have this sorta-second chance with his best friends. 

And then it’s not so bad. 

So here’s the thing: Luke doesn’t wake up one day and decide he’s going to find out more than he’s ever cared to know about Bobby’s career after they died. It just sort of… happens. 

He’s lying upside down on the couch in the studio when Julie walks in humming something. It’s catchy, Luke registers immediately, They could probably do something with whatever it is, and he’s kind of hoping that’s why she’s here now. Alex is out doing something with Willie, and Reggie is— Luke’s not exactly sure _where_ Reggie is, just that he’s not here. 

“Hey, what is that?” Luke asks, rolling over so he’s right side up again. 

“What’s what?” Julie looks around her. “There’s nothing here.” 

“No, that song that you were humming.” 

“Oh!” She blinks a few times, and it’s like Luke can see her trying to work out in her head whether she’d actually been humming, and then what exactly it was she’d been humming. He;s been there. “Well, uh,” she starts, smiling sheepishly. 

“Well, uh, what?” 

“It’s a Trevor Wilson song,” Julie says quickly. “I didn’t even realize— it’s not even a good song anyway. Unless you wrote it? Then it’s a great song, obviously.” 

“I didn’t recognize it,” Luke shrugs. “I was going to say I liked it, but actually, I hate it now.” 

“Worst song _ever_ .” Julie smiles, playing along. She drops down onto the couch and pulls her laptop off the coffee table and onto her lap. “Speaking of songs that are _not_ terrible, I have some lyrics that could use some music. Get your guitar, let’s go.” 

“Wait, Julie.” Luke pauses, and then takes a deep breath before continuing. “Can you just show me everything about Bobby? Like— all of his songs. I think if I just know everything maybe I’ll finally stop thinking about it.” 

“Are you sure?” she asks, opening up the laptop and peering over the screen. 

“No,” he says too quickly. Julie gives him a look, wide eyes that scream _make up your mind_ without her having to say the words. “Maybe. Okay, fine.” 

Julie scoots over and puts her laptop half on his leg, half on her’s so they can both see the screen. He’s still not really sure what she’s doing on here even though she’s tried to explain it, but she types in **Trevor Wilson** and then clicks on a few things.

“I’m just gonna show you all his songs first,” she says. “This is his first album.” Julie nods at the tracklisting on the screen. There are a few songs he knows are his on that list, but a lot of them are the blows he’d already dealt with when they’d first realized Bobby stole Luke’s songs. Still, he can feel himself getting angry about it. 

Julie goes back to one of the pages she was on earlier and clicks into each of Bobby's albums for Luke to read the songs. It’s a song on his fourth that stops Luke dead in his tracks. 

“Musically, lyrically, whatever, it’s not his best album,” Julie shrugs. “There’s this one song, though,” she points at a word on the screen. She must not notice the way his entire expression changed, the way he tensed up just reading the screen. “‘Coconut.’ It’s kind of a deep cut, but I can’t even lie, Luke, it slaps. The hook gets stuck in my head all the time. _Your lips on mine, our hands intertwined_ ,” Julie sings.

Luke squeezes his eyes shut and tries to take a few deep breaths.

“Are… you okay?” Julie asks. Luke opens his eyes. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” 

“Ha,” Luke deadpans. Instead of acknowledging anything else, he asks, “What does slaps mean?”

“Like, it’s a good song.” 

“Oh,” Luke says, and then goes quiet. 

“You sure you’re good?” Julie asks again, and Luke— like, he _wants_ to tell her. But he’s not sure he _can_. At least not everything. 

Luke shrugs. “That’s my song. ‘Coconut.’ I wrote it.” 

“See, I have great taste.” 

Luke stands up and starts pacing in front of the piano, the way Alex usually does when he’s stressed about stuff. 

“I think I played it for the guys one time, that was it. I wrote it about something— someone, I guess— that was sort of a secret and the fact that the whole _world_ can listen to this song now, and Bobby has no idea what it means,” he pauses, balling his hands into fists at his side. “It’s personal. And it just pisses me off.” 

“Wait, that song’s based on something real?” Julie asks. “You lived that? Who’s the girl? Does she know you wrote a song about her?” Taking in the expression on Luke’s face, a combination of closed off and completely unamused by this, she quirks an eyebrow. “What? This is payback for going through my dream box.” 

That’s fair. That is totally fair. He deserves this.

“Um,” Luke starts. “No. Alex doesn’t know it’s about him.” 

“Wait, _our_ Alex?!” Julie exclaims, and she says something else, but Luke misses the rest, already poofing out of the room. 

(Luke remembers writing ‘Coconut’ like it was yesterday. It was the easiest a song had ever come to him, words and melodies pouring out of him quicker than anything he’d ever written before. 

He thought he had been making up the way Alex was looking at him, creating something out of nothing to make it a little easier to hope. Alex was gay, Luke knew that much already, but it didn’t mean anything because being gay didn’t automatically equal Alex being into him. Luke hoped, and he never said anything, and then— Alex kissed him. 

He wrote ‘Coconut’ three days later. 

It’s about a summer fling, chapped lips and coconut chapstick, stealing kisses when no one was around and flirting pretty shamelessly even when people were. It’s about having a good thing going with your best friend, and the intense feelings that come with that sometimes— confusion and doubt in addition to all of the good stuff.

It’s about Alex. 

And he was so careful with it. Careful not to include a pronoun— because if this song was good, if people actually took notice, not everyone was cool about what they were doing as Reggie and Bobby would’ve been if they knew. Careful not to be too obvious about the fact that it had been _three days_ and Luke felt like he could write an entire _album_ on this feeling alone. 

It’s probably better that Alex never knew, anyway.)

Luke ends up on the beach, but that doesn’t help the way it normally would. It’s impossible to clear his head at a place that’s so intrinsically tied to that song and to Alex. 

There’s a part of him that thought he might be okay with whatever he’d learn from what Julie was telling him, that the initial shock had worn off weeks ago, so nothing could surprise him now. That same part of him never expected to see that song because he hadn’t thought about it in years. Now he’s all… messed up about it. 

And he told Julie. So it’s _really_ not his day. 

He goes back home after the sun sets, but he doesn’t go back inside quite yet. Instead, he circles around back and sits down with his back against the wall of the garage, pulling his knees to his chest. 

Luke’s not sure how much time passes while he’s sitting out there, but when he finally lifts his head up, Julie is sitting directly in front of him— like, if he had a body, their knees would be touching. He screams, genuinely frightened, and she laughs at him. 

“When did you get here?” he asks. 

“Ten minutes ago,” Julie shrugs. “I was waiting for you to notice. I didn’t want to disturb… whatever you’re doing out here, alone, in the dark.” 

“Are the guys back?”

Julie nods. “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell them about earlier. But speaking of earlier… do you wanna talk about it now?” 

“No.”

“I’ll sit here all night. Don’t test me,” Julie says.

Luke knows better than to do that at this point. She really will sit there all night, staring at him. If he’s going to tell someone all of this, she _is_ probably his best option; she wasn’t there when everything happened. She wasn’t even _alive_ when it happened. And she probably won’t tell things that he doesn’t want told. 

“I wrote that song about Alex,” Luke starts. He looks down at his knees and keeps going. “We were sixteen and we were… sort of together for a little while. It didn’t end like a disaster or anything, and he’s still my best friend, obviously, but yeah.”

“Are you—”

“I guess,” Luke cuts Julie off. “I never really bothered to figure it out beyond liking it when Alex kissed me.” 

It’s like— there weren’t guys before Alex, but there were one or two after him. He never told anyone about them, not even Alex. It was never enough that Luke felt like he had to label it. And then he died.

Now he just _is_. He’s not even sure how he’d label it now, not that it really matters anymore. 

“That’s cool,” Julie shrugs. 

Her casual, but steadfast acceptance reminds him of the night Alex came out to him and Reggie. Less tears tonight, overall, but he feels— okay. It reminds him of a night he and Alex were together, and Luke kissed Alex, and Alex had said “for the first time, I feel like a normal teenager, not some kind of _other_.” 

And this, right now, is helping Luke feel a little more normal. 

“Wait,” Julie continues, before Luke has a chance to say anything else. “Alex is your ex-boyfriend. You guys are so chill!”

“I said that already,” Luke teases. “Keep up.” 

“Annoying,” Julie chides, but she’s smiling. 

“Of all the songs I’d showed the guys when we were alive, I never thought Bobby would take _that one_.”

“Sing it to me.” 

“What— like, _now_?” Luke sputters. “My guitar’s inside.” 

Julie shakes her head. “Just sing it to me, Luke.” 

“I can’t.” 

“You can.” 

He actually really can’t, because the words are sort of buried in his head, underneath new things. ‘Coconut’ feels more like a repressed memory than something he really wrote right now, but as soon as Julie hums the first line, everything clicks into place. The song is right there, like he’d never forgotten it at all, and when he sings it now, it’s a lot more bittersweet than it was 26 years ago. The boyfriend in the song is an ex-boyfriend now. The feeling that drove the lyrics then has been replaced with something so much deeper, but it’s not romantic anymore. 

Luke can’t deny that it still feels really good, though. 

“You sing it better,” Julie says, as soon as he’s finished.

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I mean it. I can tell the words mean something when you sing them, Luke. You’re not just reading meaningless words from a page like Trevor Wilson does. You should write something like this again,” Julie suggests. “Don’t let him take this from you. Run with this feeling. Make it mean something.” 

“Alex is my ex now, Julie. It’s gonna be a different song.” 

Not a break-up song, he thinks. Maybe a song about realizing that there’s more than one way to love a person. 

“It’ll still be great.” 

“I’ll think about it,” Luke says, but there are already lyrics forming in his head. A catchy hook, different from the one in ‘Coconut’ but something that’ll get stuck in people’s heads. He thinks he can probably do this, and maybe this time, he’ll even tell Alex that the song is for him. 

“I’ll be ready with music when you do. I got your back.” 

He’s thinking about love and friendship. How it takes so many different forms. How Julie showed up in his afterlife and changed it completely; she’s the friend he never knew he needed. She listened today, to all that stuff he’d never even thought about telling the guys. She was _there_ and patient, and didn’t even get too annoyed at him for disappearing on her. If he could, he’d hug her right now.

“Alright, then let’s get to work,” Luke smiles, and he feels ready. Not to make peace with what Bobby did to him— to all of them— but to move on, maybe. To forge a new path with words that are entirely his own and his best friends next to him.

**Author's Note:**

> for those wondering, 'coconut' probably sounds something like kiwi by harry styles, but the lyrics are about a flirty summer thing with the guy who happens to be your bestie :)
> 
> secretly, luke is sort of pleased that in the early 2000s, bobby released a song about two dudes in love and had NO clue that's what it was about. 
> 
> on tumblr @ backinmybodymp3


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